Luminara

Not too shabby. You manage to hold on to enough global +Recharge to keep the impact minimal. One Force Feedback +Recharge, I'd guess, since my Shield/Elec tanker has 140% global +Recharge and the slotting differences between EM and Elec aren't sufficiently unique to account for that extra 100% otherwise. Could do with more Accuracy/ToHit in both cases. You move like a possum, though. I have one good lung and I can catch a possum. That Run Speed, that's like, what, six years to run from one spawn to the next, taking reverse time dilation into account?

I AIN'T SEEIN' NO GLOBAL RECHARGE, ACCURACY/TOHIT OR MOVEMENT SPEED COMPARISONS BETWEEN THOSE TWO BUILDS, BUBBLES! You're on the clock. Let's go. 😛

Global recharge, global Accuracy/ToHit, movement speeds and stats without Hybrid and Destiny? Also, that recovery rate in comparison to the endurance usage is abysmal. Turn off Sprint, you numpty.

*waves rolled-up magazine* Do I need to smack you on the boop-snoot again? I will. You know I will.

They're just washing him off. That's basic medical practice. Never expose your donor organs to unnecessary, avoidable infection vectors. That bucket is probably a "bath bomb", containing salts, iodine and other anti-bacterial and anti-fungal compounds. Good hygiene matters!

FUD-mongering? You? You? Wow, I guess it has been a slow start to the week.

Hopefully, zero.

It is necessary, and it's more helpful than you realize. Think it's tough to find a moved thread? Imaging what it would be like if every thread was in one category. No order, no topical division, just thread after thread you have to scroll past to find the one you wanted, and they're always moving, always bouncing threads up and down, off to the second page, then back to the first when you're looking on the second... Proper categorization and location of threads is what keeps forums like this in a readable format. It might be momentarily inconvenient from time to time, but it's less chaotic and confusing. And there are plenty of ways to find a moved thread. As @Greycat said, you can click the "Topic was moved to" link; if you've posted in that thread, you can go to your own profile (see that picture of yourself at the top right? click that) and click the link(s) to your post(s); if you recall the name(s) of the poster(s), you can check his/her/their profiles and click a link to the post there; there's a Search box at the top right of the page (every page).

Ditto. I left when they started talking about changing to the F2P model. I had no idealized objection to that, at that time, but in concert with the efforts to pigeonhole classes into the trinity, the lack of content at max level (was in a guild, was participating in PvP, and was still spending most of my time just standing around, waiting for something to do), and the game not meeting my expectations for a Bioware product (wanted Star Wars, not Space-WoW), it was enough to convince me that it was time to move on. Never returned, still don't regret leaving.

Essentially, yes. Everyone associated with space exploration realizes that it's a matter of taking it one step at a time. A former NASA administrator once stated that going to Mars meant going back to the Moon, and going back to the Moon meant privatizing low Earth orbit. But that's not what politicians and mass media can sell to the public, because it's not sexy, and it's not what the public wants to hear, because it's not sci-fi. That's what people want. The Enterprise. The Millennium Falcon. Battlestar Galactica. The Apollo LEMs weren't sexy, they weren't sci-fi, they weren't sleek. They were effective, but not "cool" (except to nerds (me! me!)). So there are always the problems of funding, waxing and waning public interest and convincing capitalist corporations to participate. The Challenger and Colombia losses exacerbated the problems, as did the cost overruns and overly long construction of the ISS. The Hubble telescope has done a lot to grab public attention, but it's also frustrated a lot of people. They see those glorious images and want to go there in person, right now, not eventually, not in a slow rocket, but in their personal space yachts or on space cruise liners. So yeah, it's a horizon problem. I believe the Artemis program and the Chinese Moon landing program will bring our attention back to what's in front of us, though. It won't be jaunting around in the Horsehead Nebula in a brainship, but it will be a nibble at what's to come, and the billions of us who were born just a little too late to watch the Apollo missions on television are starving for that. Sexy or not, being able to watch people land on the Moon, seeing people go back, witnessing the construction of the first Moon base... that will grab attention. I'm all tingly now, just thinking about it.

A light year is ~5,880,000,000,000 miles, and the closest star (Proxima Centauri) is more than four times that distance from Earth. Using nearly light-speed travel, it would still take almost 4.5 years to reach it. But we can't even do that, yet. We could pack a few very young people into a ship, point them in the right direction and send them off, but they'd die of old age centuries before the ship reached that star. We simply can't fly fast enough to make the journey in a reasonable time. The Voyager 1 probe has been in continuous flight since September 5, 1977, is the most distant human-made object, and the fastest object we've sent out, and it only recently passed the heliopause boundary (the point at which pressure from the Sun's solar winds is too low to push back interstellar gases). After ~45 years, it's still only about ~13,000,000,000 miles away from us, roughly 0.00225% of one light year's distance. We can't do it with what we have now. We just can't. There are only three realistic possibilities for space exploration outside of our Solar System. Light-speed/FTL travel, sleeper ships and generation ships. The laws of physics won't permit us to travel at the speed of light, so we're investigating ways to sidestep those laws, such as the Alcubierre drive. If we can prove the existence of the Higgs field and understand how it functions, we might develop a method of altering it to increase or reduce mass, which could also lead to light-speed or FTL ships. Sleeper ships are out of our reach, for now, because we just don't know how to make that idea work. How, exactly, do we make people go to sleep for several centuries, then wake them up, and not subject them to extreme aging throughout the process? Right now, we can't. There are some animals which undergo various forms of hibernation, and others which can survive sub-freezing temperatures without experiencing organ and tissue damage, but we don't understand how to adapt those to human bodies yet. Generation ships offer the highest probability of success with the currently available technology, but they're not economically feasible (the expense of sending trillions of tons of mass into space would be greater than the combined GDP of all of the nations in the world), nor would they be environmentally viable (refer to my previous post, regarding the strip-mining of the planet). Even confining our exploration to within the Solar System, we're looking at having people in ships for years. Years. Plural. Sure, we can reach the moon in about 4 days, but beyond that, we're looking at long journeys. Mars, the next closest body of interest, would be around 18 months round-trip, minimum, and that's not including the time spent in orbit or on the surface, doing what we went there to do (just going, then turning around and returning would be an enormous waste of resources). That's a very long time to be in space, bombarded with ionizing radiation, living off of pre-packaged food, recycling water and air, enduring low or no gravity, etc., after having been blown into space by riding a column of explosives (which you hope won't simply detonate en masse during launch). Every time we launch people into space, we have to (try to) conceive of every possible situation and account for it, and what we've learned from our limited experience is that we just can't foresee everything. No-one had even imagined the Apollo 13 situation, for instance. There was no strategy for dealing with the explosion of the oxygen tank, for the carbon monoxide build-up in the LEM, for the re-entry startup sequence with dead fuel cells on the CM... What do we do if there's a situation when the ship is 11 months away from a return to Earth? If someone has to perform an emergency procedure and requires communication with ground control, they're going to be dealing with communication delays of several minutes, so they won't be able to rely on ground control to assist them. We can plan for a wide range of situations, but we can't plan for everything, nor can we send everything to deal with every potential scenario. And we've lost enough brave men and women to haste and poor planning. Sending people into space just to die won't be of much use. Corpses are terrible explorers. They can't record observations. They can't perform experiments. They can't collect samples. All we can learn from corpses is what we did wrong. So we're taking it slowly. We're crawling, because we fell down, got our boo-boos and learned that we're not good at walking yet. We're not walking on Mars yet because we can't provide a reasonable assurance that the people we send will still be alive when they reach Mars, or when (if) they return. There are also places where we simply cannot send humans. Not because of the distance, the time it would take to go there, but because they're so hostile to us that they're impossible to explore in person. The temperatures and pressures of the Venusian and Jovian atmospheres, along with other considerations, such as the composition of Venus' atmosphere and Jupiter's radiation belts, take them off of the list of candidates for human exploration. Probes are the only way we can explore many places in the Solar System. It was only (relatively) recently that we learned there are living organisms which can thrive in conditions previously thought to be inimical to all life. Entire ecosystems living around black smokers on the ocean floor, utterly independent from photosynthesis! Extremophile bacteria living in salt, and rock, and acids and alkalis, even exposure to gamma, X-ray and UV radiation which should kill them, environments which we can't survive without protective equipment! Even without leaving this planet, we're discovering relevant, important information which will aid us in future space endeavors. Exogeology, exobiology, applications of particle physics and quantum theory to space exploration, fusion power... in the last 50 years, research fields have been created and developed due primarily or exclusively to interest in space exploration, areas of critical importance to our future in space. Our fascination with space never waned, it grew, but what we learned in the second half of the 20th century taught us that we need to learn more, and in more diverse fields, to build a better scientific platform on which to engineer our space programs. We haven't stopped trying. Every nation capable of putting a probe into space has done so, and continues to do so, and the nations without space programs are working toward building them. We have cooperative programs between nations, building and launching probes and sharing data. China wants to send people back to the Moon before this decade ends. NASA's Artemis program, which is a combined effort from several nations' space agencies, is still funded and progressing toward a return to the Moon by 2025. Despite all of the obstacles thrown into our path by governments run by bureaucrats and politicians, the wars, the uneasy tensions between various nations, the secrecy inherent in patents and state interests, the dreamers and thinkers are still pushing forward with human space exploration. Including us, the ordinary, average citizens of the world, who won't stop asking, "When?", who can't stop looking up at the sky and feeling that breathless anticipation, who haven't stopped dreaming of the wonders awaiting us in space. We haven't given up. We're not waiting, we're limited to making do with what's available. Every probe we send into space, to Mars, to the Moon, to a comet, to an asteroid, to Pluto, every mission helps us, even if they're not as exciting as building a Moon base or colonizing Mars. Every time we discover something new about this planet, it gives some knowledge we can apply to other celestial bodies. Every experiment in particle physics, quantum theory, fusion technology, nuclear isotopes, chemistry, biology, metallurgy and other sciences bring us a little closer to the stars. We're learning more about the Solar System, we're testing different propulsion methods, we're confirming hypotheses, we're discovering things we didn't know, we're conducting experiments, we're learning and growing and developing a better global space program, one which will take us into the galaxy, some day. We're much closer than we were 50 years ago, and advancing constantly. We will get there, in due time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

The reality is, we won't be flying around the galaxy in the Enterprise, we'll be going in hollowed out asteroids. Our first generation or two of space dwellers will live in the Moon. The Moon has much of what we'll need for our Solar System ships, things like titanium, silicon, carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, things we don't want to rapidly deplete on our home planet by shooting them into space because it would be burning our bridge before crossing it. We'd never make enough ships, or ships large enough, to transport the entire population, but we would be forced to, essentially, strip-mine most of the Earth for ship-building resources. Acquiring those resources from the Moon is a much more attractive option, as it ensures the continuity of Earth, the quality of life for the people still on it and allows us to start at a convenient planetary body with lower gravity (thereby reducing associated costs). Those Moon dwellers will spend their lives in subterranean complexes. We're going to have to dig for some of the things we need. Copper. Silver. Zinc. Lithium. Things desirable for electrical cabling and wiring, solar panels and batteries. If we don't have power, we're not going anywhere, so we'll be digging. And since we're digging, we might as well live in the tunnels we dug. There wouldn't be any regolith in them. The mass surrounding our miners would be more than sufficient to block all forms of ionizing radiation. We can seal the surface-connecting sections of the complex with airlocks, fill the tunnels with breathable air, light and heat, and barring impact events, we're unlikely to experience any geological instability. If something did happen to crack one of our tunnels, we'd have tons upon tons of tailings and slag to seal it up. With an underground complex, we could also address the question of growing things. And we will need to grow things, to keep our air breathable without relying on chemical processes or machinery; as well as the food we'll require; and we can turn the excess into useable and necessary products, such as plastics to insulate those cables and wires we'll be making. Plants won't grow on the surface if they're bombarded by UV, and a dome thick enough to filter out UV would also refract and distort any sunlight passing through, so we're not going to see much success doing it that way. Underground, we can provide them with grow lights, just like we do here on Earth, and they'll be much better protected in our warm, dry environment under the surface. Those grow lights will be good for us, too, helping alleviate the claustrophobia of subterranean dwelling. We'll still have to deal with the low gravity, but we'll adapt or create solutions (creating artificial gravity via Higgs field manipulation, for instance, when we learn how to do that). And then, we'll move on to Mars. Not because we really want a Martian colony, or because it will be an economically feasible next step, but to prove that what we learned in the Moon is applicable elsewhere. We'll build another factory/colony underground on Mars, verify that we know what we're doing and then, then we can start looking at other stars as destinations. By that point, we will have developed sufficient skill and knowledge in the fields of mining and tunnel construction in space, and as cool as it would be to build giant starships, we'll take the practical route of hollowing out asteroids. We'll extract useful minerals and elements, create our living and operations areas on the go and supply ourselves with all of the repair material necessary, all in a single stroke, and then fit engines onto our self-sufficient, self-contained, radiation-proof flying rocks and cruise off into space. Sure, the rest of the intelligent life in the galaxy might look at us as space hoboes, but we're not going to space to impress them, we're going because we're explorers and adventurers, and arriving alive is more important than arriving in style, dead.

We were discussing the potential for challenge which exists in the game in the form of mez and how that challenge is not utterly obviated by the existence of status protection. I gave an example of exactly that. I have no idea how you went from there to "stop asking for brute buffs". Seriously, where did that come from? Here's a summarization of the discussion up to this point: You said, "I don't think we should allow everyone to be completely immune to mez. That's power creep!" I said, "No-one's completely immune to mez now. I'm mezzed through mag 10 protection regularly." You said, "NO WAY!" I said, "I fight enemy groups with multiple critters who can mez, like Carnies, Rikti, Arachnos and Malta. A character with 10 points of protection to Hold/Sleep/Stun can still be Held/Slept/Stunned, so the challenge provided by mez still exists for everyone, and allowing the minority with zero status protection to stay active through a single mag 3 mez isn't power creep, it's just making the difference between the haves and have-nots less pronounced." And now, two days later, you come back with the above-quoted material, which has absolutely nothing to do with that conversation. I play that character at that level and against those enemies specifically because they can do that to her. It's in keeping with the character concept. And I know what I'm doing. Save the HOW2PLAY advice for the newbies, if you would, please. Not one person in this thread has complained about soloing, or being incapable of soloing, +4/x8, GMs or AVs. Well, I do have two people on /ignore, but no-one who isn't on my /ignore list has said anything even remotely like that. You're not normally this erratic. Is something wrong?

This concurs with my test (am currently watching combat attrib window, relevant set IO slotted in a toggle which is deactivated). The status resistance is global, the regeneration is procced.

-KB enhancements are globals, always on, even if the power's toggled off. As long as you don't exemplar more than 3 levels below the enhancement's level, of course.

Eh, might as well take it. I'd say donate it to the Paragon Orphans Rehoming Network, but we don't have any orphans, or children, and the P.O.R.N. was driven out of Paragon City over a minor misunderstanding leading to a moral panic. Seriously, how was the COO supposed to know that marshmallow cream would do that? @Luminara in-game, send nudes inf*.

That's not the burning sensation you'd be able to cure with penicillin. 😱

You had five months to claim it before I picked it up. Never letting it go now, I love it. 😛 Carnies, Malta, Rikti, Arachnos at +1/x8 solo. They all have more than one critter with mez, and at x8, there can be two of each in a spawn. Every mission I play with those enemies results in at least one instance of being mezzed, and I actively seek out missions with those enemies, so it's a regular occurrence. Power creep is inevitable in any game involving improvement to the character. Holding back a small percentage of characters doesn't prevent power creep, or make the game more challenging for those who have already crept far above that small percentage's capabilities, it just punishes the minority unnecessarily. And the HC team is addressing power creep right now, creating and adjusting content to provide challenges for the creepiest creepers. That minority should be lifted up to the same level as everyone else so they can participate in the creepy content at the majority's level, not pushed down as a justification for holding power creep at bay. That ship sailed as soon as one person level up to 2 on launch day, it's not coming back.

They might not be barren. Try to impregnate one and tell us what happens.

When I play Legionette, even with 10 points of Hold, Sleep and Stun protection, I'm Held, Slept and Stunned. The teaming incentive provided by mez is still there. Empowering the minority won't remove that incentive. It won't make anyone useless or unwanted. If the existing incentive proves to be insufficient, there are always other incentives that can be tweaked, modified, improved or added. And there are plenty of other reasons for players to team already. Merits, Incarnate rewards, special enhancements, more rapid inf* and XP generation, greater likelihood of valued drops... friendship. Fear of change, fear of being unwanted, fear of being left behind is no way to live, and no way for a game's future to be decided. We move forward, or we're just existing until the end comes, and nothing remarkable or worthwhile comes from a life, or a game, constrained by fear.

No-one's invulnerable to mez now. Status protection defers the effects until sufficient magnitude is stacked, but it doesn't make the protected individual invulnerable to mez. I've been mezzed through mag 10 protection many times. The point of proliferating status protection isn't to make everyone impossible to mez, it's to even out the wide disparity between the ~88% and the ~12%. The ~88% can shrug off three mag 3 mezzes. The ~12% can't shrug off a single mag 2 mez. The ~88% have 0.0s animation time attached to their damage mitigation toggles when suppression ends, and those damage mitigation toggles only ever have to be activated a single time, immediately upon acquisition (barring detoggling after entering "personal story missions"). The ~12% have varying animation times attached to their comparable damage mitigation toggles, up to 3.3s, or the click powers they're required to activate provide comparable damage mitigation, and those clicks and toggles have to be reapplied with every spawn, and the toggles turned back on every time mez disables them. The ~12% have to spend still more time trying to counter mez by using their own status effects pre-emptively, presuming their primaries or secondaries offer status effects, and always have a 5% chance for that attempt to fail (missed). The ~88% spend 0.0s countering mez and have a 0% chance of failure because status protection is a buff. The ~88% is better equipped to deal with the loss of control due to mez already, due to toggle reactivation after suppression being automatic, but they also tend to have a larger pool of HP to buffer them. Some of the ~12% have heals or +Regen, but neither is usable while mezzed... and some of the ~88% also have heals and +Regen, which they can use despite one or two mezzes landing. The ~12% have to dedicate at least part of their inspiration inventory to one specific inspiration. The ~88% have the option to utilize a more diverse selection of inspirations. The ~88% have higher damage output across the board, allowing them to progress quickly through content, and this is magnified by their ability to shrug off most mez. The ~12% have lower damage modifiers and scalar values, even accounting for the -Res in their primaries and secondaries, and are required to progress at a much slower pace, thereby magnifying the temporal discrepancies between them and the ~88%. After all of their extra clicks and re-toggles, they're slowed down further by their lower damage output. The ~12% have one pool-based option to deal with mez (i don't include Acrobatics because it doesn't prevent Stuns or Sleeps, it's only mag 2 Hold protection, and there aren't any critters with Holds of mag 2.9 or less of which i'm aware). Not a great option, but since it's there, it's pursued. The ~88%, not having the need to pursue that option, can exercise more lateral choices in character design and play style. How many points of disparity do I need to list to make it apparent? Lack of status protection costs that ~12% significant amounts of real life time and compromises build diversity, neither of which should be sacrificed on the altar of teaming or the retention of "the way it was when the game was released". The ~88% aren't forced to play Issue 0, the ~12% shouldn't be, either. That is the point. Not immunity to mez, but a less drastic gulf between the two groups. Mez is still, and will always be a threat, but that threat is disproportionately higher for the ~12% than it is for the ~88%, who fold when a mag 2 effect completely shuts them down, whereas the ~88% soldier on without ever realizing there was a mez.

Wait, Spanky was actually... Steamy Spankbot? NEMESIS' SEX TOY?! EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW. Ew.

You left out stalkers, dominators, Kheldians, Soldiers of Arachnos, controllers with Indomitable Will and/or pets which hold aggro exceptionally well, blasters with their triple-stacking mag 1 status protection ATO, and masterminds who let their henches do the heavy lifting. And the defender/corruptors playing a primary with status protection. Because teaming should be optional, not a mandated solution to a problem which only exists for a minority, and that only because the design bible was thrown into a shredder shortly after the game launched.

I believe I can bolster your position with some more pertinent facts, @Bill Z Bubba. A Break Free lasts 30s. If a player expects a mission to take 10 minutes, that's 20 Break Frees he/she's going to be toting along to make it through the mission without being mezzed. How many inspiration slots do we have at level 50? Oh, look at that, it's 20. Let's see, what would a status-protected character carry, since he/she doesn't need 20 Break Frees... well, he/she could stock up on Lucks, but since that status-protected character has self-affecting toggles which only suppress, and don't require the character to engage in animation time when the suppression ends, they don't necessarily need Lucks. How about Insights? Eh, really not necessary most of the time, but it's nice to have one on hand for the occasional Blind. Okay, we have 19 more slots to fill, let's see... hell, let's just stick a CaB, a Respite and a Luck in there, the "Justin Case collection", and pack the rest of the tray with 16 Rages. We don't need to enter a test environment to determine which character would complete that hypothetical mission more quickly, more easily and in less jeopardy, it's patently obvious. So it really does come down to e-mailing inspirations to oneself to make the claim that the balance between the haves and have-nots is maintained by inspirations. Without that, there's definitely no parity, in any sense. Using the e-mail to yourself option to sidestep the 20 slot limitation, yeah, that's on the shady side of legitimate, but it is still, technically, legitimate. Still, it doesn't benefit the unprotected characters as much as it benefits the protected ones. Claiming items from e-mail takes time. Click the e-mail, click Claim, click the next e-mail, click Claim... even if it's done with a macro or bind, that's still time spent. The unprotected characters are already spending extra time on animations for click and toggle debuffs, this just stacks more time against their completion run. Animation time which status-protected characters aren't spending, because, even if they're mezzed, their self-affecting toggles they automatically restore without animation when the mez ends, and they may never need to claim anything to keep going, and still be faster, in less danger and having an easier run. I wholeheartedly agree with you, the very notion that the situation is "fine" because a defender/corruptor can pack his/her e-mail with inspirations is beyond ludicrous, because it ignores the fact that characters with status protection can pack their e-mail with inspirations just as well, and drive their own performance edge even further away from that of the characters with no status protection. It's a given that everyone has access to inspirations, in the general sense, but that everyone has equal access to different load-outs of inspirations is not, not even with that extra 100 in e-mail. The characters with status protection always come out ahead when inspiration use is factored in, because they're less reliant on them in general, and rocking status protection which frees up their selection of inspirations overall. Stating that characters without status protection are balanced by inspiration use in the current game is completely disingenuous misinformation based on speculation in a vacuum, independent of the facts, and not even remotely reflective of the reality of the situation.